Author: davmac

When I started working on Dinit I had only a fairly vague idea of the particulars of various other init systems, being familiar mainly with Sys V init and to a lesser extent, Systemd and Upstart (the latter of which has more-or-less vanished off the face of the earth). At that stage it was a purely personal project and I didn’t count necessarily making it public; as time went on I heard lots of complaints about Systemd, which has become the choice of init system of many distributions; I did a little research on some other systems – enough to satisfy myself that Dinit filled a worthwhile niche – and then made an announcement that I was planning to develop it into a(nother) complete init/service manager that could potentially compete with Systemd.

Around that time, I also wrote a short document trying to summarise the differences between a number of extant systems, or at least between them and Dinit, and included this in the documentation of Dinit (as part of the source tree). However, the time has perhaps come to write a more comprehensive treatment examining the differing design choices of various systems; hence, this post. Hopefully I can give an interesting overview of some design decisions that are made in a service manager, highlight specific features of various particular pieces of service management software, and give some incidental background on why I’ve made the choices I have in the design of Dinit (though I’ll to try to keep this from being too Dinit-focused).

Recap: supervision system vs service manager vs system manager

The various terms – supervision, service manager, system manager – sometimes get thrown around a little loosely, but for my purposes here it’s better to have a clear distinction between them. Without further ado:

Supervision system: a process or means for supervising service processes, providing a means to start and terminate individual services and perhaps to automatically restart them if they terminate unexpectedly.

Into the category of supervision system falls the likes of daemon-tools, runit and S6. Note that a supervision system need not be made up of just a single process: it might supervise individual service processes using separate supervisor processes, for example. Also, an active “service” might not necessarily correspond to a running process (for example a “network” service could be made active by executing a script which terminates after the network interfaces are configured).

The next category is that of service manager:

Service manager: a process or means for starting or stopping services which have dependencies from and to other services, such that the dependencies of a service must be started before the service itself is started, and the dependents of a service should be stopped before the service itself is stopped.

So, compared to a supervision system, this adds the concept of dependency management. Some might disagree that “service manager” should entail dependency handling, but for our purposes here it’s useful to have a convenient name for such a distinction, so we make the separation – dependency-handling service management versus individual service supervision.

Note that it may be possible to implement a service manager as an additional component on top of a separate supervision system – for example, S6-RC and Anopa both implement service management over the S6 supervision system.

This brings us to the final category:

System manager: a process (or processes) responsible for controlling system startup, shutdown, and other system-level actions.

A system manager typically has to arrange for the bring-up and stopping of services, which it may do by also being – or by delegating to – a supervision system or service manager. A system manager includes an init process which is launched by the kernel as the first userspace process at boot.

It’s worth noting at this point that, while a service manager built on a supervision system typically requires tight coupling with the other system – it needs to know the specific details of how to start and stop services, and to observe changes in service state – a system manager can, in comparison, maintain quite a loose coupling; it only needs to tell the supervision system (or service manager) to start, and to stop, and can leave the handing of individual services to the supervisor’s care.

I should add that different systems use different terminology for what Systemd calls “units”, the basic concept of a thing that can be started and stopped and can have dependencies on other units. In Systemd terminology, a “service” and a “target” are different types of unit. Other systems just stick with “service” for everything, regardless of whether there’s a process or other functionality attached. The distinction isn’t particularly useful here, so I’ll use the terms unit, target, and service more-or-less as synonyms.

Pure supervision as service management

In my definitions above, I outlined the primary distinction between supervision systems and service managers as being.a question of dependency management.

However, a system where services technically have interdependencies can work with a supervision system that doesn’t manage dependencies. In the most basic form, it’s possible to rely on the fact that a service will naturally fail if its dependencies are not satisfied; it should then be restarted (ideally with a gradually increasing delay) by the supervisor, until the dependency itself has become available.

It may also be possible to explicitly start any dependencies as part of a service’s startup script (and optionally also stop known dependents as part of a stop script). The runit documentation suggests:

before providing the service, check if all services it depends on are available. If not, exit with an error, the supervisor will then try again.

…

optionally when the service is told to become down, take down other services that depend on this one after disabling the service.

Certainly this can work. Although in general checking for dependencies being available prior to starting is prone to a race condition (nothing prevents a dependency from stopping just after the check is made), this seems unlikely to be a common problem in practice. In fact the joint technique outlined above allows a quite simple supervision system to provide much of the functionality associated with a service manager, provided that the dependencies are correctly encoded in the start/stop scripts.

However, that niggling race condition remains. For services which, for whatever reason, won’t behave as we want them to when dependencies are (or become) unavailable, this could potentially be problematic. Is it a stretch to claim that such services may in fact exist? Maybe it is, though I’m not particularly willing to vouch that various web app frameworks won’t lock themselves up if the DBMS becomes unavailable for a little too long, for example.

There’s also the fact that continuously polling to start services will consume system resources (only very little, if the “check for dependencies first” approach advocated by the runit documentation is followed; perhaps a significant amount if it’s not). It may also make noise in log files: service X can’t start, service X still can’t start, …, and so on. And a polling approach means that, when the dependencies of some service do become available, there may be a little delay before the service itself starts: the supervisor has to decide to try and start it again, and has no cue to do this over than by some timer expiring. These by themselves are minor issues, of course.

One advantage of proper dependency-handling service management is that you can usually query the system for dependency information (“what other services will need to be started in order to start service X?”, “what is the total set of dependencies for service X?”, etc).

The runit model of separating one-time initialization (stage 1) and daemon management (stage 2) does not always work: some one-time initialization may depend on a daemon being up. Example: udevd on Linux. Such daemons then need to be run in stage 1, unsupervised – which defeats the purpose of having a supervision suite.

This seems a fair point and a good example, though I’m not sure it would be impossible to supervise even udevd in a supervision-only system (even if it might require tweaking the existing systems a little).

I’m certainly in favour of dependency-managing systems (and of course Dinit is such a system), though I’m aware the arguments for it may sound a little wishy-washy, and to some degree it’s a matter of personal preference.

Complexity level of dependency relationships

Different service managers provide different dependency configuration options, with differing levels of complexity.

At the most simple end, S6-RC offers only a single type of dependency: that is, a service can depend on another, and will not start unless the other starts first. However, it appears to be unusual in this regard. Many systems have the concept of a soft dependency – which should be started with a dependent, but for which failure should not cause the dependent to also fail. The “hard” and “soft” dependencies are termed differently in different systems (needs, requires, depends-on vs wants, waits-for).

The benefit of a soft dependency is essentially that you can enable a service but not have its failure prevent your system from booting due to the rollback that results (assuming that the system performs such rollback; discussion of activation model and rollback yet to come).

OpenRC has both a needs and a uses/wants relationship (“uses” vs “wants” in this case have different semantics depending whether the dependency has been enabled in the current runlevel; most other service managers have largely done away with the concept of runlevels).

Nosh has requires and wants relationships, and separately supports start ordering relationships (before/after, indicating that another service’s start/stop should be ordered with respect to this service, even if there is no dependency between them). Nosh dependencies can be specified in both directions (this service requires that service, this service is required-by that service). It also has a conflicts relationship: if one service is started it can force another to stop, and vice versa.

Systemd is a law unto itself, with more dependency types than you can count on one hand; consider it as Nosh++ (though I believe Systemd came first, and Nosh borrowed from it, rather than the other way around). It’s not clear how commonly useful most of the dependency types are, though they were presumably implemented with reasons in mind.

For Dinit, I eventually opted for three dependency types: depends-on (requires), waits-for (wants), and depends-ms (depends as a milestone; the dependency must start for the dependent to start, but once started it effectively becomes a waits-for dependency). The latter, depends-ms, is of somewhat dubious value and may be removed if I cannot find a compelling scenario for it. In my eyes three dependency types (or even better, two) is a nice middle ground giving good functionality with relatively low complexity.

Systemd documentation mentions the common requirement for a dependent to start only once the dependent has properly started:

It is a common pattern to include a unit name in both the After= and Requires= options, in which case the unit listed will be started before the unit that is configured with these options.

I do not see any compelling reason for having ordering relationships without actual dependency, as both Nosh and Systemd provide for. In comparison, Dinit’s dependencies also imply an ordering, which obviates the need to list a dependency twice in the service description. (edit: a problem caused by separating ordering and dependency is described in this Systemd bug ticket).

Activation model of service managers

Suppose that we have two services – A and B – and that the first depends on the second. When A is started, B will also be started. The question is: what if A is then stopped?

There are two somewhat reasonable answers:

Since the action was to start and stop a single service, the state of all services should return to what it was before either action. B should therefore stop, since it has not been explicitly started (i.e. rollback should occur naturally).

Services should start, or stop, only when required to do so. Since B started when A was started, and has not been required to stop, it should not stop.

I believe that most systems take the 2nd approach, but Dinit takes the first (and tracks which services have been explicitly activated versus which have only started due to being required by a dependent).

I am not certain that either approach is definitely better than the other. The first provides a nice consistency for the scenario described (starting and then stopping a service will generally return the system to the original state), and avoids potentially leaving unneeded services running; the second on the other hand reduces overall service transitions.

Advocating for the first approach, one benefit is that it is simple to emulate runlevels. If you set up each runlevel as a service (target, unit) which depends on the services that should run in that runlevel, then you can “switch runlevels” by starting the new runlevel service and stopping the old one. There is no need to explicitly set any services to stop: if they are not required by the current active runlevel, they will stop anyway (although additional services can always be activate via an explicit command).

(Compare to Systemd’s approach to runlevels: it implements a separate command, “isolate”, to deactivate services not belonging to the new runlevel).

Also, with the first approach, boot failure is detectable as all services stopping without having received a shutdown command. That is, “boot” is a service with dependencies; if one of the necessary dependencies fails to start, “boot” will also fail, and at that point it releases all other (successfully started) dependencies, so that they then stop. There is no need to have “special” knowledge of the boot service, or to have a special failure case for that particular service. This is arguably just an implementation detail, though.

Now advocating for the second approach: consider the case of repeatedly attempting to start a service which has several dependencies, but which is failing due to a configuration issue: the administrator tries to start the service, and watches as its dependencies start and then stop again since the service itself failed to start. They then attempt to repair the configuration, but do not succeed, and on attempting to start the service again see the dependencies bounce up and then down a second time (let’s hope they get it right the third time…). This would be avoided with the second approach, since the dependencies would simply remain active when the service failed to start.

The problem described above could probably be avoided, even with the first approach, in various ways, but any solution would no doubt add a little more complexity to the system.

I personally still find the first model more natural and compelling – but again, it’s arguably just personal preference.

Special targets

Some systems have special targets with special semantics. Often certain targets are started to perform, or as part of, particular system actions: a shutdown target can be started when the system is to shut down, for example. Systemd has a large list of special targets, including targets that get created by Systemd when certain hardware is detected, and targets to represent mount points, which Systemd has special handling for.

Systemd also adds dependencies automatically to or from special targets. For the basic target:

systemd automatically adds dependency of the type After= for this target unit to all services (except for those with DefaultDependencies=no).

And for the dbus.socket unit:

A special unit for the D-Bus system bus socket. All units with Type=dbus automatically gain a dependency on this unit.

(The dbus unit is for launching the D-Bus daemon, and causes Systemd to connect to the bus after the unit starts. Systemd and D-Bus are somewhat intertwined; D-Bus has the ability to start service providers by communicating with Systemd, and Systemd exposes various services via D-Bus, as well as being able to determine that a service is ready via a D-Bus name becoming available).

Other service managers don’t tend to have as many special targets. Nosh documents a few in its system-control man page, but not as many as Systemd, and it has no special relationship to D-Bus for example. Dinit uses boot as the default service to start, but otherwise does not treat that service specially in any way; other design choices (such as the activation model) made special treatment unnecessary.

Service description/configuration mechanism

A number of supervision/service managers have gone with a “directory-per-service” approach (which I think perhaps was pioneered by daemon-tools? I’m not sure). In the directory you have a script used to run the service, some files which each contain a parameter setting, and perhaps a subdirectory containing links to dependencies. (That’s a broad stroke; many of the systems have subtle differences. S6-RC dependencies are listed one-per-line in a “dependencies” file for example). The benefit of having one-setting-per-file is that it requires no parsing and makes the system simpler. The downside is that it is a little bit more complicated to easily check the whole service configuration (though tooling can help).

Other systems – including the venerable Sys V init, as well as OpenRC – simply have a script per service. In the case of OpenRC, the script (optionally) has a special interpreter, openrc-run, which offers dependency handling functions. Various metadata is extracted from the scripts (and cached in a separate database).

Dinit, and Systemd, both use a single file per service (“.ini” style). I find this more convenient for editing service descriptions generally; the downside is that parsing is required. In the case of Systemd running as system manager, this means parsing in the PID 1 process, which many would frown upon. I’m not convinced this is really a big problem (*); Dinit’s configuration parser is quite simple and has proved robust (in my own use) – though it’s worth noting that Dinit doesn’t demand that it runs as a system manager (PID 1), whereas Systemd does expect this (“Note that it is not supported booting and maintaining a full system with systemd running in --system mode, but PID not 1″).

(* edit: the “not a big problem” I was referring to here was parsing in general, not the parsing in Systemd, which has historically been problematic at times – though even that has, as best as I can tell, been significantly improved and become better tested).

S6-RC is unusual in that it requires the service descriptions to be compiled into a database. OpenRC, as mentioned, also stores service metadata separately to the service script, but only as a cache. In either case, I suppose it is potentially possible for the compiled data and the source to become inconsistent, though I doubt it is much of a problem in practice.

Monolithic vs modular process design

One question around the design of a supervision/service/system manager is, how many processes should make it up? A number of the smaller and simpler systems have gone for the approach of breaking things up into many processes. Taking S6-RC as a case in point, the service manager (S6-RC) is separate to the main supervision process (s6-svscan of S6) which in turn runs supervisor processes (s6-supervise) which, finally, run the service process. Typically the service process is launched via an execline script, which allows calling various chain-loading subprograms to set up environment, UID/GID, etc.

The idea behind breaking things up this way is, essentially, that it allows each component to be small, simple, and “obviously correct”. There are those who argue that this approach fits the “unix philosophy” of “do one thing and do it well”. This is not an entirely bogus argument; by limiting the function of an individual program, it’s somewhat easier to make sure that the program is fundamentally correct.

On the other hand, composing multiple small programs into a more complex system still results in, well, a more complex system. If the functions of a system can easily be decomposed into separate processes, they can most likely be decomposed to individual modules within a single-process program as well. (And, having multiple processes comes with its own disadvantages: certain system-level functionality is only going to be possible to implement by communicating between modules; if the modules are separate processes, that means inter-process communication, and in general that’s going to increase complexity significantly. This might not prove to be a problem for a service manager, though, if the need for such communication is really limited).

The main point that I am trying to make is that breaking functionality into separate processes does not make the overall system any simpler. It may offer an advantage in terms of making it possible to use the individual components separately, but it’s not clear to me that this is really useful. Probably the main real benefit is, potentially, an increase in robustness: if one of your various sub-processes does crash, it won’t necessarily bring down the whole system.

Enter Systemd into the discussion. Systemd insists on incorporating not only service management and supervision into a single process, but system management as well: it wants to run the whole thing as PID 1, a process which, if it crashes, causes the kernel to panic (at least on Linux) and thus really does bring the whole system tumbling down. (Edit: to be fair, Systemd tries hard not to actually crash, but to catch eg SIGSEGV and go into a mode of limited operation which allows the system to function enough that you can sync filesystems before shutting down).

For Dinit, in comparison, I felt no concern about having just service management and supervision all in a single process. And in fact, Dinit does support running as a system manager, within the same process – but it does not require this; Dinit’s quite happy to act as a system-level service manager but have another process be the system manager. Additionally, Dinit is just generally far simpler than Systemd (as should be clear by now).

Some people are always going to prefer breaking things up into processes that are essentially as small as possible: I can understand this to an extent, I just don’t agree that it’s always a worthwhile goal, and I don’t think that Dinit suffers from being less modular than many of the alternatives.

Robustness and failure modes

The decision to write important system-level software in non-memory-safe languages such as C and C++ has been criticised. Yet, such software continues to be written in such languages (although certain other options such as Rust and Go have been gaining traction recently).

One of the systems I haven’t mentioned up this point is GNU Shepherd; mainly, my concern is that it’s written in Guile, an interpreted (or bytecode-interpreted) language with garbage collection – and I see both the “interpreted” and “garbage collection” parts as undesirable for system-level software (especially for a potential init). Interpreted software will be less efficient (if not in actual speed, since I’ll acknowledge that JITs can do amazing things, at least in memory usage) and garbage collection presents a similar issue. If the software was so complex that we couldn’t make it robust without using a memory-safe language/runtime – and if we weren’t willing to use Rust or another GC-less option for some reason – then perhaps the use of GC would be acceptable, but I don’t believe that’s actually the case; Dinit has so far proven to be robust, and even Systemd, despite early foibles, rarely actually crashes (even if it fails in other ways, as occasional rumbles on the web suggest).

A real concern of GC’d languages generally is, can programs in these languages be made resilient to out-of-memory conditions (are allocations even always explicit)? I haven’t looked closely enough at Shepherd to be able to pass comment, but I would not be surprised if it turned out that memory allocation failure is not something it is designed to handle (I’d be happy to be shown otherwise). Despite the low probability of an out-of-memory situation occurring, I still think it’s something that a service manager – and especially a system manager – needs to be able to deal with.

Conclusion

Well, that ends our tour of concerns. If you got this far – thanks for reading, and I hope it was interesting and informative. There are of course a lot of other aspects of service manager design – and some unique features of particular systems – but this article has gotten quite long already. Please feel free to add constructive comment, correction or discussion.

A discussion of undefined behaviour and compiler optimisation, particularly in regards to signed integer overflow.

C (and C++) compilers are becoming notorious for exploiting the notion of undefined behaviour – the idea that certain things a program might do have no behaviour proscribed by the language standard, and that the compiler can assume the program doesn’t do these things when it is generating object code. Quite a few people have been objecting to this, since it can result in the generated code not doing what the programmer intended; the problem is becoming more noticeable over time, as compilers introduce more sophisticated optimisation techniques which are more likely to exploit the notion.

One prominent example is that of signed integer overflow. Most C programmers are developing for machines which use a 2’s complement representation of integers; addition and subtraction, with such a representation, is implemented in exactly the same way as for unsigned arithmetic. If the addition of two positive signed integers overflows – that is, if the result is larger than can be represented – the processor will produce a number that, when interpreted as a 2’s complement signed integer, will appear to be negative. This is called “wrapping” because the value has “wrapped around” from the high end of the numeric range to the low end.

For this reason, you occasionally see C code that looks something like this:

The “if” statement is designed to detect the overflow condition (in this case from adding 1000 to the value from the variable ‘a’) and report an error. The problem is that, in C, signed integer overflow is one case of undefined behaviour. Compilers, for some time now, have performed an analysis which shows that the condition can never be true: if I add 1000 (or any positive number) to another value, the result cannot be smaller than the original value; if overflow occurred, that is undefined behaviour, and it is the programmer’s responsibility (arguably) to ensure that their program never exhibits such behaviour. Therefore, the compiler may decide that the entire if statement can be removed as an optimisation (it can never be true, it can never have an effect, it may as well not be there).

The problem with this compiler optimisation, in this case, is that it has removed the test that the programmer specifically used in an attempt to detect the overflow situation and handle it. An example of this with a real compiler can be seen here. (Side note: the godbolt.org site on which that example is hosted is great! you can edit the code and see the compiled form with a wide range of compilers. Play with it!). Observe that the overflow check is not removed if the type is changed to an unsigned integer, since unsigned overflow has defined behaviour in C (or rather, more accurately, unsigned arithmetic is defined to wrap and thus the overflow does not actually occur).

So is this wrong? Some have argued that it is, though it’s clear that many compiler vendors feel that it’s legitimate. The main arguments made by proponents of (edit: implementation-defined)wrapping overflow behaviour, if I understand them correctly, boil down to variants of the following:

The C language standard, in regards to undefined behaviour, gives license for implementations “ignoring the situation completely, with unpredictable results”, but this doesn’t allow optimisations to assume that the situation for which the undefined behaviour is proscribed will not come about.

Let’s look at these one by one:

Wrapping on overflow is a useful behaviour?

The main utility for a wrapping behaviour is to be able to detect overflow after it occurs. (If there are other uses, that could not be handled using unsigned integers instead, I am not immediately unable to think of any and suspect they are rare). While this would indeed simplify the problem of avoiding the use of erroneously overflowed results, it certainly doesn’t help in all cases (consider multiplication, or addition of two unknown quantities with unknown sign).

For the trivial case where wrapping behaviour does allow simply detecting overflow after it occurs, it is also straightforward to determine whether overflow would occur, before it actually does so. The example above can be rewritten as follows:

That is, you can perform a check to see whether the result of an addition will exceed the maximum representable value, rather than performing the addition and then trying to determine whether that overflow occurred by checking if the result is mathematically inconsistent. (If the sign of both operands is unknown, the check becomes significantly more complicated, but this is also true when checking for overflow after the operation with wrapping overflow semantics).

With this in mind, I’m not really convinced that wrapping overflow is generally useful.

Wrapping is the behaviour expected by programmers?

It’s more difficult to argue against this point, since clearly at least some C programmers have written code which expects wrapping semantics for signed integer overflow. However, I don’t think that this alone is a strong argument for implementing wrapping semantics by default (note that several compilers implement options for wrapping overflow, if it really is desired).

An obvious mitigation for the problem of programmers expecting this particular behaviour is for the compiler to issue a warning when it optimises based on the alternative undefined-behaviour-is-assumed-not-to-occur semantics. Unfortunately as we see in the godbolt.org link above, compilers don’t always do so (Gcc 7.3 does but 8.1 does not, so this appears to be a regression).

If true in all cases this would be a compelling argument for having compilers default to wrap-on-overflow, since it is probably better to allow the “detect overflow after it occurs” mechanism described above to work even if it is technically incorrect – if only because that mechanism may be in use in code which is arguably broken.

I suspect that with typical C programs the benefit of this particular optimisation (removing checks for mathematically impossible conditions) is usually negligible, because C programs tend to be written by programmers who are seeking good performance and who tend to hand-optimise their code anyway: that is, if it’s obvious that particular “if” statement has a condition that can never be true, the programmer would likely have removed the statement themselves. Indeed, a search reveals a few studies where the effectiveness of this optimisation has been questioned, tested, and found to be mostly insignificant for the particular benchmarks under test. However, while in many cases there is no benefit for C, the code generation engines and optimisers in compilers are commonly general and could be used for other languages where the same might not be so generally true; consider C++, where it is somewhat idiomatic in templated code to rely on the optimiser from removing redundant code, rather than doing it manually. There is also the case of languages being transpiled to C and relying on the C compiler to optimise away redundant code.

Also, even without overflow check elimination, it is not necessarily correct to assume that wrapping integers has minimal direct cost even on machines which use 2’s complement representation. The Mips architecture, for example, can perform arithmetic operations only in registers, which are fixed size (32 bit). A “short int” is generally 16 bits and a “char” is 8 bits; if assigned to a register, the underlying width of a variable with one of these types will expand, and forcing it to wrap according to the limit of the declared type would require at least one additional operation and possibly the use of an additional register (to contain an appropriate bitmask). I have to admit that it’s been a while since I’ve had exposure to any Mips code and so I’m a little fuzzy on the precise cost involved, but I’m certain it is non-zero and other RISC architectures may well have similar issues.

The language standard does not allow for signed integer overflow not to wrap, if that’s what the underlying architecture does?

This argument is particularly weak when examined. It essentially states that there is a requirement that “undefined behaviour” actually grants only limited license to the implementation (compiler), by the text of the standard. What the text that proponents latch on to says precisely is the following, as part of the definition of undefined behaviour:

The claim is that “ignoring the situation completely” would not allow for assuming that the situation leading to the undefined behaviour – overflowing addition, for example – could not happen, but rather that, if it does happen, the implementation must carry on as if it did not happen but must respect the result it would obtain from asking the processor to perform such an operation (putting it another way: as if the translation from source to machine code was direct and naive).

First, we should observe that this text is in a NOTE and therefore non-normative (may not proscribe behaviour), according to the ISO directive mentioned in the foreword of the same document:

In accordance with Part 3 of the ISO/IEC Directives, this foreword, the introduction, notes, footnotes, and examples are also for information only.

Given that the “possible undefined behaviour” appears in such a note, it is not proscriptive. Note that the actual definition text for “undefined behavior” reads:

behavior, upon use of a nonportable or erroneous program construct or of erroneous data, for which this International Standard imposes no requirements.

I have added emphasis on the important part: there are no requirements for undefined behaviour; the list of “possible undefined behaviors” in the note contains merely examples and cannot be definitive. “Imposes no requirements” is unambiguous.

Some extend the argument to say that, regardless of what the text actually says, the intention of the language committee when those words were drafted was that the behaviour should in general match that of the underlying hardware, as closely as possible, assuming a naive translation to machine code. This may be true, though I’ve not seen any evidence (such as historical text) that supports it. Even if it were true, however, it would not necessarily apply to the current incarnation of the text.

Final thoughts

The arguments for wrapping on overflow are mostly flawed. Probably the strongest argument that can be made is a combination: it is occasionally expected by less experienced programmers (who do not understand the nuances of C and of its undefined behaviour), and is not particularly harmful to performance – however, the latter is not true in all cases, and the former is a somewhat dubious reasoning when considered by itself.

Personally, I feel that I would much rather have trap on overflow than wrap. That is, I would rather that a program crash instead of continuing with either undefined behaviour or a potentially incorrect value, either of which could be a security issue. This would certainly have a slight performance impact on most(?) architectures, particularly x86, but on the other hand it would immediately flag overflow bugs rather than allowing them to be exploited or to produce incorrect results further down the line. It could also in theory allow the compiler to safely remove redundant comparisons following a potential overflow, because it ensures that they really can’t happen, though I note that Clang and Gcc both apparently fail to take advantage of this.

Fortunately, both trapping and wrapping options are implemented by the compiler I use most often, which is Gcc. The “-ftrapv” and “-fwrapv” command line arguments can be used to enable each respectively.

There are of course a number of other causes of undefined behaviour; integer overflow is only one. I don’t necessarily think that all of these are useful and I do think that there are plenty of specific cases where the semantics should be defined by the language, or at least classified as implementation-defined. And I’m wary of compiler vendors being too liberal in their interpretation: if the compiler behaves in ways that are counter-intuitive, especially for someone who has read the language specification themselves, there is always the risk of real software bugs resulting; if the opportunities for optimisation that such an interpretation opens up are negligible, it is hardly worthwhile to adopt it. An examination of some issues around this area may be the topic of a future post.

Addendum (24 Aug 2018)

I’ve realised that much of the above could be better written. To briefly summarise, clarify, and add some minor points:

I was not trying to argue that undefined behaviour on overflow is preferable to wrapping, but rather that wrapping is not much better than undefined behaviour on overflow in practice. In particular, you can get security issues from wrapping behavior in much the same way as you can with undefined behaviour – and I’d argue that many security issues resulting from unchecked integer overflow, other than those which come from the compiler removing erroneous post-overflow checks, actually come from the fact that the value has wrapped around rather than any other undefined behaviour associated with the overflow.

The only real benefit of wrap-on-overflow is that it doesn’t cause post-overflow checks to be removed. While that might eliminate some attack vectors, it leaves open the possibility that some overflows won’t be checked for at all (i.e. the programmer did not include an overflow check) and will be uncaught.

If security is not a concern but speed of execution is, undefined behaviour on overflow may allow better optimisation possibilities and provide a performance benefit, at least in some cases. On the other hand if security is a concern, wrap-on-overflow potentially leaves holes open.

This means that between trap-on-overflow, wrap-on-overflow, and undefined-behaviour-on-overflow, I see very few cases where wrap-on-overflow should be the preferred choice.

In regards to post-overflow checks, I have concerns that leaving them in place could lead to the wrong perception (that post-overflow checks work and are guaranteed to work). Trap-on-overflow avoids this problem. Good warnings help to alleviate it.

I think that any programmer writing security-sensitive code will ideally have a good grasp of the semantics of, and the potential pitfalls of, the language they are writing in. For C, this means understanding the overflow semantics and nuances of undefined behaviour. It’s unfortunate that some C programmers still don’t seem to have that level of understanding.

I have seen a claim that “most C programmers expect wrapping behaviour”, but I’m not aware of any evidence that this is true. (I’ve said “some” above since I’ve seen anecdotal evidence and I doubt this would be disputed anyway).

There are two separate issues: one is what the C language standard should require, and another is what the compilers should implement. I’m (somewhat) ok with the language standard specifying undefined behaviour for overflow. This post is arguing for what the behaviour of compilers should be.

Trap-on-overflow need not require that every operation is checked for overflow; ideally it would only mandate that the program either behaves in a mathematically consistent manner or aborts, which allows for “temporary overflow” that doesn’t generate an incorrect result. This would allow optimising “a + b – b” to “a” (which wrapping also does) and “(a * b) / b” to “a” (which wrapping doesn’t).

Addendum (21 Nov 2018)

It turns out that the GCC implementation (circa 8.2) of -ftrapv is terrible – it doesn’t detect all overflow cases, and it causes a large performance degradation due to farming out most arithmetic operations to support functions (i.e. it imposes a function call overhead for a simple addition). The Clang/LLVM implementation is much better.

Well, yes, I’m still working on Dinit, my portable and “lightweight” intended-as-an-alternative to Systemd. The first commit was on August 27, 2015 – just under three years ago – and my first announcement about Dinit on this blog was on June 14 last year. In looking up these dates, I’m surprised myself: I was working on Dinit for two years before I wrote the introductory blog post! It didn’t feel like that long, but it goes to show how long these things can take (when you’re working as a one-man development team in your spare time).

I recently issued a new release – 0.2.0, still considered alpha – with some new features (and bugfixes), and am planning a 0.3.0 release soon, but progress certainly has been slow. On the other hand, things really have come a long way, and I’m looking forward to being able to call the software “beta” rather than “alpha” at some point soon (though I suppose it’s open question if those terms really mean much anymore). One year in seems like a good time for a retrospective, so here it is; I’ll discuss a number of things that occur to me about the experience of developing some non-trivial software as a lone developer.

On software quality

One thing that’s always bothered me about open-source projects, although it’s not universally true, is that the quality isn’t always that great. There are a huge number of half-done software projects out there on Github (for example), but more importantly there are also a large number of 95% done projects – where they are basically working, but have a number of known bugs which have been sitting in the issue tracker for a year or more, and the documentation is mostly-correct but a bit out-of-date and some of the newer features aren’t mentioned at all. Build documentation is often seen as optional; you can always “just run ./configure –help” though of course it’s not entirely clear what all the options do or how they affect the result, and in my experience the chance that a configure script correctly checks for all the required dependencies is pretty low anyway.

Take the source of any major project, even an established one, and do a search for “TODO” and “XXX”, and the results are often a little disturbing. I try to avoid those in Dinit, though to be fair the count is not zero. There are some in Dasynq (the event-loop library which I’ve also released separately), and some in Dinit’s utility programs (dinitctl and shutdown), but at least there are none in the Dinit core daemon code. But keeping it that way means consistently going back over the code and fixing the things that are marked as needing fixing – or just avoiding creating such holes in the first place. By the time I release version 1.0 I’d like to have no TODO comments in any of the Dinit code.

Documentation is another thing that I’ve been very careful about. Whenever I add any feature, no matter how small, I make sure that the documentation gets updated in the same or the very next commit. I’m glad to say that the documentation is in really good shape; I plan to keep it that way.

Also, tests are important. I don’t enjoy writing them, but they are really the only way I can ensure that I don’t cause regressions when I make changes or add new features, and it satisfying to see all those “PASSED” lines when I run “make check”. I still need to add more tests, though; some parts of the code, particularly the control protocol handling and much of the service description loading, don’t have tests yet.

On autoconf and feature checks and portability

Dinit doesn’t use autoconf and doesn’t have a “configure” script. Basic build settings like compiler and compiler switches are specified in a configuration file which must be hand-edited, though this process isn’t onerous and will generally take all of a whole minute. I wouldn’t be against having a script which would probe and determine those particular settings but I also don’t see a strong need for such a thing.

In terms of system call features, Dinit largely sticks to POSIX, and in the few cases where it doesn’t it uses an #ifdef (eg `#if defined(__FreeBSD__)’). The latter probably isn’t ideal, but the danger of feature checks for system calls is that they usually can only check for the existence of a function with a particular name, and not that it does what we need it to do; I think I’d rather that you have to explicitly specify in the build configuration that such-and-such a call is available with the right semantics than to just check it exists and then blindly assume that it is what we think it is, but just checking for specific systems seems like a nice compromise, at least during development.

As it is now, if you run a current version of Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD or MacOS then you can build by editing a single file, uncommenting the appropriate section, and then running GNU make. I’ve also experimented briefly with building it on Sortix but ran into an issue that prevented me from getting it working.

On contributions (and lack thereof)

I’ve had one very minor contribution, from the one person other than myself who I know actually uses Dinit (he also maintains RPM packages of Dinit for Fedora and CentOS). I do sometimes wish that others would take an interest in the development of Dinit, but I’m not sure if there’s any way I can really make that happen, other than by trying to generate interest via blog posts like this one.

What I really should do, I guess, is clean up the presentation a bit – Dinit’s README is plain text, whereas a markdown version would look a lot more professional, and I really should create a web page for it that’s separate to the Github repository. But whatever I do, I know I can’t be certain that other contributors will step forward, nor even that more than handful of people will ever use the software that I’m writing.

On burnout (and avoiding it)

Keeping the momentum up has been difficult, and there’s been some longish periods where I haven’t made any commits. In truth, that’s probably to be expected for a solo, non-funded project, but I’m wary that a month of inactivity can easily become three, then six, and then before you know it you’ve actually stopped working on the project (and probably started on something else). I’m determined not to let that happen – Dinit will be completed. I think the key is to choose the right requirements for “completion” so that it can realistically happen; I’ve laid out some “required for 1.0” items in the TODO file in the repository and intend to implement them, but I do have to restrain myself from adding too much. It’s a balance between producing software that you are fully happy with and that feels complete and polished.

On C++

I’ve always thought C++ was superior to C and I stand by that, though there are plenty who disagree. Most of the hate for C++ seems to be about its complexity. It’s true that C++ is a complex language, but that doesn’t mean the code you write in it needs to be difficult to understand. A lot of Dinit is basically “C with classes (and generic containers)”, though I have a few templates in the logging subsystem and particularly in Dasynq. I have to be very careful that the code is exception safe – that is, there’s nowhere that I might generate an exception and fail to catch it, since that would cause the process to terminate (disastrously if it is running as “init”) – but this turns out to be easy enough; most I/O uses POSIX/C interfaces rather than C++ streams, and memory allocation is carefully controlled (it needs to be in any case).

I could have written Dinit in C, but the code would be quite a bit uglier in a number of places, and quite frankly I wouldn’t have enjoyed writing it nearly as much.

Of course there are other languages, but most of the “obvious” choices use garbage collection (I’d rather avoid this since it greatly increases memory use for comparable performance, and it often comes paired with a standard library / runtime that doesn’t allow for catching allocation failures). Rust might seem to be a potential alternative which offers memory safety without imposing garbage collection, but its designers made the unfortunate choice of having memory allocation failure cause termination – which is perhaps ok for some applications, but not in general for system programs, and certainly not for init. Even if it weren’t for that, Rust is still a young language and I feel like it has yet to find its feet properly; I’m worried it will mutate (causing maintenance burden) at a rate faster than the more established languages will. It also supports less platforms than C++ does, and I feel like non-Linux OSes are always going to be Rust’s second-class citizens. Of course I hope to be proved wrong, but the panic-on-OOM issue still makes Rust a non-starter for this particular project.

On Systemd

Even when I announced Dinit after working on it for some time I struggled to explain exactly why I don’t like Systemd. There have been some issues with its developers’ attitudes towards certain bugs, and their habit of changing defaults in ways which break established workflows and generally caused problems that were seen by many as unnecessary (the tmux/screen issue for example), but few specific technical issues that couldn’t be classified as one-off bugs.

I think what really bothers me is just the scope of the thing. Systemd isn’t an init system; it’s a software ecosystem, a whole slew of separate programs which are designed to work together and to manage various different aspects of the system, not simply just manage services. The problem is, despite the claims of modularity, it’s somewhat difficult to separate out the pieces. Right from the start, building Systemd, you have a number of dependencies and a huge set of components that you may or may not be able to disable; if you do disable certain components, it’s not clear what the ramifications might be, whether you need to replace them, and what you might be able to replace them with. I’d be less bothered if I could download a source bundle just for “Systemd, the init daemon” and compile that separately, and pick and choose the other parts on an individual basis in a similar way, but that’s just not possible – and this is telling; sure, it’s “modular” but clearly the modules are all designed to be used together. In theory you may be able to take the core and a few select pieces but none of the distributions are doing that and therefore it’s not clear that it really is possible.

Also, I think it’s worth saying that while Systemd has a lot of documentation, it’s not necessarily good documentation. For example (from here):

Slices do not contain processes themselves, but the services and slices contained in them do

Is it (a) slices do not contain processes or (b) slices do contain processes?

This is just one example of something that’s clearly incorrect, but I have read much of the Systemd documentation a number of times and still struggled to find the exact information I was looking for on any number of occasions. And if you’re ever looking for details of internals / non-public APIs – good luck.

Regardless of whether Systemd’s technical merits and flaws are real, having another option doesn’t seem like a bad thing; after all, if you don’t want to use it, you don’t have to. I’m writing Dinit because I see it as what Systemd could have been: a good and reliable standalone service manager with dependency management that can function as a system init.

On detractors and trolls

I guess you can’t take on something as important as an init system and not raise some eyebrows, at least. Plenty of comments have been made since I announced Dinit that are less than positive:

(If you say so, though I can see some irony in accusing someone of hubris and then immediately following up with a tweet essentially claiming that you yourself are the only person in the world who understands how to do multi-process supervision).

Maybe I bought the last one on myself to some degree by saying that I was aware I could be accused of NIH and that I didn’t care – I was trying to head off this sort of criticism before it began, but may have inadvertently had the opposite effect.

> It will be both efficient and maintainable. It will be stable. Solid-as-a-rock stable.

Author does not have any tests whatsoever and uses a memory unsafe language. I don’t see how he wants to achieve the above goals.

(I know that it is difficult to believe, but truly, it is possible to write tests after you have written other code).

Anyway, this is the internet; of course people will say bad (and stupid) things. There were plenty of positive comments too, such as this one from hacker news:

I’m not a detractor, but there are many things systemd can still improve, but it feels we’re kind of stuck. I’m quite happy if we have some competition here.

Yes! Thank you. There were also some really good comments on my blog posts, and some good discussion elsewhere including on lobste.rs. Ultimately I’ve had probably as much positive as negative feedback, and that’s really helped to keep the motivation up.

The worst thing is, I’ve been guilty of trash-talking other projects myself in the past. I’ve only done so when I thought there was genuine technical issues, and usually out of frustration from wanting software to be better, but that’s no excuse; it doesn’t feel good when someone says bad things about software (or other work) that you created. If only one good thing comes from writing Dinit, it’s that I’ve learned to reign in my rants and focus on staying objective when discussion technical issues.

I guess that’s about a wrap – thanks for reading, as ever. Hopefully next time I write about Dinit it’ll be to report on all the great progress I’ve made since now!

My previous blog post, Understanding the C/C++ memory model, got more (and still receives more) attention than I ever thought it would, so I feel obliged to add a follow up to expand on the topic a little more.

First, a few things that might not have been entirely clear or were missing from the previous post:

The post was focused on acquire and release memory ordering constraints for atomic operations (and memory barriers), while the language model provides various other memory ordering constraint options. While some of these should be reasonably obvious (memory_order_relaxed, which essentially implies no constraints, and memory_order_acq_rel, which combines both acquire and release semantics in a single operation), some others warrant explanation.

In case it was not clear, the default memory ordering constraint for the atomic operations provided by the standard library is actually memory_order_seq_cst. Importantly, if this default is used exclusively, some of the issues applicable to the use of acquire/release orderings are no longer of concern. However, this ordering potentially imposes a performance penalty if used when it is not actually required.

In some cases acquire/release is not enough and we do need to make use of a stronger ordering constraint.

However, with all that in mind, I mostly want to focus in this post on presenting a more detailed model for understanding exactly what acquire/release entail. In particular, I aim to present a comprehensible model of processor hardware – even if the model is not accurate to any particular hardware – that allows for understanding the C/C++ memory model without having to rely solely on language-defined semantics. I’m not claiming that this model is complete nor even entirely correct, but I believe it may help to understand acquire/release semantics.

A hardware model to explain acquire/release

So, bearing in mind that this is not what real processor architecture necessarily looks like, let’s suppose that each processor (or processor core) is connected directly to a pair of caches (or buffers if you prefer) which are then connected to the main memory of the system:

Note that I’ve opted to call them “buffers” in the diagram, since I’ve learned that describing them as caches might lead to pedants claiming that the model is wrong, although it’s worth bearing in mind that (a) many people will best understand the behaviour of the buffers as being that of a cache and that (b) this model is not supposed to accurately represent any particular hardware.

I hope that the function of the store buffer and read buffer in the diagram is obvious: writes performed by the processor core go through the store buffer before reaching main memory, and reads need to go through the read buffer if the value to be read isn’t otherwise already available in either buffer. Both buffers can hold multiple values, each value corresponding to a different address. At arbitrary times and in unspecified order, values from the read buffer can be discarded, and values from the store buffer can be flushed to main memory.

Note that the buffers allow for different threads to observe reads and writes to be observed in different orders by different threads (cores), but that a thread should always see its own reads and writes in program order – in particular, if a thread writes to an address and then reads from the same address, the read operation should see the same value as was written, unless that address may have been written to by another thread in the meantime.

What may be a little confusing is that the link between the processor core and each buffer is depicted as being two-way. In fact, this is necessary for maintaining consistency between the buffers: if a single core is to store a value to a particular address, and then read that particular address, then it shouldn’t be possible that the read loads a value from main memory before the prior store has actually reached main memory. So in fact, a store operation from the processor both updates an existing value or stores a new value in the store buffer, and updates any existing value (for the corresponding address) in the read buffer.

With all this considered, how do acquire and release operations tie in? Quite simply: an acquire operation forcefully flushes the read buffer (discarding its contents), and a release operation forcefully flushes the store buffer (writing its contents to main memory). Importantly, this means that a value written must be followed by a release in the same thread, and then an acquire – in another thread – before it is read by the 2nd thread. This is what the language model itself requires.

What about atomic operations themselves? Unfortunately they are a bit hard to explain directly in terms of this simple model. We could say that atomic operations simply bypass the buffers and operate directly on main memory; the main issue with this is that it doesn’t allow for re-ordering of atomic operations on different addresses, which the language model does allow (although the orderings must still obey the associated constraints).

What happens if two processor cores have a store in their store buffer to the same address? Well, that’s most likely a race condition; similarly if a store in one processor buffer matches a read from another.

Sequential Consistency

The default ordering constraint for atomic operations provided by the C/C++ standard library is memory_order_seq_cst, where “seq_cst” is a shortening of “sequentially consistent”. Put simply, an atomic operation with sequential consistency implies both acquire semantics (if the operation is a load) and release semantics (if the operation is a store), as well as preventing other atomic operations (of any kind) from being re-ordered with respect to the sequentially consistent operation.

Why is this ever necessary, though? Well, consider the example in the previous post of a mutual exclusion device (mutex) implemented via a spinlock, using a compare-and-exchange operation to acquire the mutex and a store to release it. Previously I suggested that acquiring the mutex could use (naturally enough) acquire semantics and releasing it could use, similarly, release semantics. In the normal case of a single mutex protecting some data structure, this is generally correct.

Sometimes, however, more complex applications can require more than a single mutex to be locked at the same time. With careless design, this can lead to deadlocks: if there are two mutexes, A and B, and one thread locks them in [A,B] order while another does so in [B,A] order, you potentially get the situation where each thread holds one mutex and requires the other (but can never obtain it). A typical approach to avoiding such problems is to impose a consistent ordering of mutex acquisition: the program could be designed, for instance, to always acquire the mutexes in the order [A,B]. Of course it is still possible to acquire either mutex alone without causing deadlock, so long as the B mutex is released before acquiring the A mutex: the important thing is that the mutexes are never acquired in the order [B,A].

In our particular example, even though atomic operations may be re-ordered, the acquisition of the B mutex will not be re-ordered with respect to the acquisition of the A mutex, since no store or load (including via an atomic operation) can move prior to an acquire operation. However, what can happen is that the release of one mutex can be re-ordered with respect to the acquisition of another (by moving it from before to behind), and this is problematic: Suppose that we have the sequence, in one thread:

acquire B

release B

acquire A

release A

This should be ok – it doesn’t acquire the mutex A while B is held – but as has just been suggested, this sequence could be re-ordered (by the compiler or processor) as follows:

acquire B

acquire A

release B

release A

If another thread is obtaining both mutexes in the proscribed order, A and then B, this will lead to deadlock! The solution is to use sequentially consistent ordering, which prevents any atomic operation being re-ordered with respect to the sequentially consistent operation. Note that it’s not necessary to make every mutex operation sequentially consistent; I’ll leave it as an exercise to decide on the best solution.

Edit 3 April:Preshing believes that the problematic re-ordering detailed above isn’t allowed by the C++ language standard (he doesn’t mention C and I’ve not checked whether it has similar wording). I’m not entirely convinced myself either that the paragraph he quotes necessarily means that this is the case, nor that it is intended to do so, though I’ve not given it full consideration yet. Another example of where sequential consistency makes a difference is given in an answer to this stackoverflow question.

Conclusion

The hardware model I’ve presented is hopefully simple enough to understand while providing comprehensible rationale for the particulars of the release/acquire semantics provided by the language model. It may however not be correct in every aspect and is not complete; use it only for what it is. I’ve also discussed sequential consistency and why it is sometimes necessary to avoid deadlocks.

I haven’t discussed the “consume” memory ordering, and may leave that for another time, but I encourage anyone who’s interested to seek out explanations elsewhere. I hope that this post and the one preceding it are enough to give a good grounding in the issues addressed by the memory model.

I know that a lot of people struggle with understanding the memory model introduced in C11/C++11. In a recent conversation I was alerted to the existence of this blog post, which while correct (by my understanding) is in my opinion aimed at those who already have a good understanding of some of the underlying concepts. I’m going to try to set out my understanding of the model, which is hopefully correct, in more straightforward terms and with a more “ground up” explanation.

Edit: some redditors complained that the description of cache operation (such as it was) in the original version of this post contained technical inaccuracies, if interpreted as a description of current actual mainstream architecture. I believe those inaccuracies were not important for the understanding of the C/C++ memory model, however, they have now been rectified. Still: If you really want to understand anything about how processor architecture works, this is not the article for you. Rather, this is about a software model that is designed to abstract away much of that detail, and is deliberately light on hardware-level specifics.

Introduction: Program order versus memory order

You have your C/C++ program and it stores values (sets a variable or stores a value through a pointer) and it loads values (reads a variable or reads a value through a pointer). The order that your program specifies these loads and stores is the “program order”. However, there are a number of things that can cause the order in which the stores and loads actually occur to your system’s main memory to be different to that of the program order. It’s worth noting that the effect of these can never be visible to a single-threaded program, because the compiler must make the sure that the code behaves as if the loads/stores are in the order that the program specifies. Some examples:

the compiler will often cache values in registers rather than storing them to memory immediately;

the compiler may re-order reads and writes to memory when it can determine that such re-ordering won’t affect program behaviour (so long as the program obeys the language rules);

the processor may perform out-of-order execution in some cases;

even when the generated code stores values to memory rather than a register, the store might go into a processor cache and stay there for some time before it goes through to main memory;

similarly, loads may read values which are already in the cache, which means they don’t need to be read from main memory (at all);

finally, when a cache writes lines back out to main memory it may do so in an order that is different to the order in which the values entered the cache.

The good news is, you don’t really need to understand any of the above points: all you need to understand is that loads and stores can be re-ordered before they go to memory, but this won’t affect the actual behaviour of a single-threaded program.

Now for the important part: in a multi-threaded program, some of these re-orderings – together with some additional issues associated with the methods used by the hardware for maintaining cache coherency – also can cause different threads to see loads and stores made by other threads as occurring in a different order. It’s probably worth noting that a program in which this actually happened could well be exhibiting undefined behaviour – what should happen is that the program uses the memory consistency primitives to make sure that it sees a “correct” ordering. We’re coming to that now.

Atomic operations

If we forget about standard synchronisation tools such as mutexes, then there are two essential mechanisms to making ordering consistent between threads: atomic operations, and memory barriers.

Atomic operations are operations which complete indivisibly. One classic example is the “atomic increment”. A “classic” (non-atomic) increment can be broken into three separate parts: it loads a value from memory, it increments the value, and then it stores the value back to the same location in memory. In multi-threaded programs, the problem with this that the value might be changed by another thread in between the load and store, and that results in storing the wrong value; the intermediate store value is lost. In particular consider two threads that are both trying to increment the value starting at 0:

Thread A loads the value 0

Thread B loads the value 0

Thread A increments the value, calculating a result of 1

Thread B also calculates a result of 1

Thread A stores the value 1

Thread B stores the value 1

The problem is that the value has gone from 0 to 1, despite there being two increments – one of the increments got lost. (Again, if this actually happened in a C/C++ program, that program would be exhibiting undefined behaviour). An atomic increment happens as one step, atomically (indivisibly). So, to avoid the problem above, you could use an atomic integer type and an atomic increment operation.

Another classic atomic operation is “compare and exchange”. This can be used to implement a spin lock (a kind of mutex) – you treat a value of 0 as “unlocked” and a value of 1 as locked. Then, to lock the mutex, a thread can atomically compare the current value with 0 and, if it is equal to 0, set it to 1. The operation returns the original value – if 0, the lock was successfully, if 1 then another thread has the lock and so it must be retried until the other thread releases the lock (typically this would be done in a loop, “spinning” on the lock until it becomes available).

Before we go any further, let’s note the following important points about atomic operations:

Atomic operations on a particular object (variable) always have a total ordering which is consistent with program ordering. This means that every atomic operation from every thread which operates on the same atomic variable happens either before or after other every other operation, and if a thread does two operations one after the other then they will appear in the same sequence in the total ordering.

If an atomic operation is performed in one thread and another thread then performs another atomic operation on the same variable, the second thread will definitely see the effect of the operation performed by the first (assuming there are no other threads stepping in to perform other another operation in the meantime).

What atomic operations do not necessarily do is enforce ordering on any loads and stores that occur around them (I say necessarily because, as you may be aware, you can specifying memory ordering constraints when you perform an atomic operation*. We’re getting to that).

Consider the case of the spin lock that we discussed above: the lock is probably designed to protect some data structure. So you might have a sequence that looks like this:

Thread A acquires lock

Thread A stores values to data structure

Thread A releases lock

Thread B acquires lock

Thread B reads values from data structure

Thread C releases lock

The problem is that the atomic operations used to implement the lock by themselves don’t impose ordering on steps 2 and 5, so thread B might not see the values written by thread A, or even worse, might see some of the values but not all of them (this is a data race, and is not actually allowed to happen in a correct program; a correct program would use the appropriate memory ordering controls to prevent it from happening).

To prevent re-ordering of non-atomic loads and stores, we use barriers (aka fences).

Barriers

A barrier prevents loads and stores from being re-ordered past the barrier, in one or in both directions. Specifically: an acquire barrier operation prevents loads/stores which are after the barrier from being re-ordered to appear before the barrier, and a release barrier prevents loads/stores which are before the barrier from being moved after the barrier (there are other types of barrier operation, but I won’t cover them here right now).

Through the use of appropriate barriers, we can almost fix our spinlock example:

Thread A acquires lock

Thread A issues an acquire barrier

Thread A stores values to the data structure

Thread A issues a release barrier

Thread A then releases the lock

Thread B acquires the lock

Thread B issues an acquire barrier

Thread B reads values from the data structure

Thread B issues a release barrier

Thread B then releases the lock

There is still one minor issue, which is that the operations which actually acquire and release the lock could be moved past their corresponding barriers (e.g. step 5 could be re-ordered in front of step 4). There are two ways that C++11 resolves this:

First, you can combine atomic operations which acquire or release some lock with a barrier, so that the operation and the barrier are essentially indivisible (this is performed by passing the appropriate consistency constraint constant as a parameter to the atomic operation);

Second, a standalone barrier (std::atomic_thread_fence) actually acts as a stronger barrier than what is stated above. Specifically, a standalone release barrier actually also prevents subsequent stores – including atomic stores – from being moved in front of the barrier, and a standalone acquire barrier also prevents earlier loads from being moved behind the barrier.

Conclusion and key take-aways

Some key points that I wanted to cover which some more advanced tutorials tended to gloss over:

Memory barriers are useless without some kind of synchronisation (which atomic operations provide). Memory barriers do not themselves provide any synchronisation. Atomic operations themselves do not provide a memory barrier;

Atomic operations can have a memory ordering constraint specified as a parameter. This effectively creates a barrier of the specified type, and forces the atomic operation to stick on the appropriate side of that barrier.

There are of course a lot of things I didn’t cover here, but there’s plenty of other material out there which covers the concepts in more detail. I hope the explanations here, which I’ve tried to reduce to the bare essentials, are helpful to some.

* Edit: it should be noted that the default ordering constraint on atomic operations is actually memory_order_seq_cst which implies both acquire and release semantics (depending on the operation) and provides additional guarantees beyond. So, while an atomic operation doesn’t itself imply a memory barrier, an atomic operation with the default memory order constraint does so. It may be preferable to use acquire/release semantics explicitly however since the default constraint can affect performance.

I’ve been very busy lately, though have managed to spend quite a bit of time coding on Dinit, and of course I released Dasynq which forms the “backbone” of Dinit, in a sense, by providing a robust event loop library. I don’t want to write a major article right now and in truth probably don’t have the content to do so, so just a quick point-by-point update:

As mentioned, Dasynq 1.0 was released, and there have since been (ahem) 4 minor bugfix releases.

The basic service management functionality of Dinit is largely complete; it supports the dependency types I determined were needed; it handles process supervision pretty well (most recently, I implemented start and stop timeouts, which are configurable per-service). Running services under different uid’s is not yet supported but should be trivial to add.

However, the major thing still missing is the ability to modify services on-the-fly, or even unload/reload service definitions for services that aren’t running. That’s a priority, but it will not be trivial.

On the other hand, system boot and shutdown/restart are handled pretty well. Dinit has been the init system of my desktop PC for many months now.

One significant milestone was reached: I got my first pull request for Dinit. It was small, but it showed that at least there is someone out there who is following progress, and it came as a pleasant surprise.

There are plenty of other rough edges. There’s no way to specify initial environment, either per-service or globally – that shouldn’t be hard to do but I’ve been putting it off (it’d make a good task for a new contributor, hint hint…). I’d like to separate PID 1 (the actual init) from the service manager, or at least make it a supported option to do so. Cgroups, namespaces and jails aren’t supported yet. There is only a “poor man’s” version of socket activation. And so on.

Even with all that, we’re along way from the full functionality of Systemd. That might be a good thing, though. The plan has pretty much always been to delegate parts of that functionality to other packages. The goal is to provide, together with other packages, a replacement that’s capable of running a desktop with all of the important functionality available.

The test suit has improved a lot, and I put a lot of effort into mocking system interfaces for the purpose of testing. That’s starting to pay off, and the number of tests is rapidly increasing. Of course the down side is that writing tests takes time away from adding functionality, but in the end it’s a certainly a win to have a comprehensive test suite.

I spent some time recently looking a bit more closely at both Nosh and S6-RC, two service managers which can function as or cooperate with an init system. Both are pretty decent, and both are in a more complete state than Dinit, although Dinit is catching up reasonably fast and I believe Dinit offers at least some functionality that these lack. One idea I might need to borrow from these is the concept of chaining processes together (so a logging process can be run separately to the service process, but the file descriptors that tie them together can be maintained by Dinit so that you can potentially re-start either process with minimal risk of losing log messages).

That’s about all I’ve got to say for the moment. Hopefully I can find some time to craft a longer blog post next time, and with some more interesting news to share. Thanks for reading and questions/comments welcome as always!

For someone looking at the rate of commits being pushed to Dinit, it might appear that development has halted. The good news is that this isn’t really the case; instead of working directly on Dinit, I’ve been working on a sub-project that came out of Dinit’s development. Allow me to introduce: Dasynq, the C++ event-loop library for robust clients!

The Background Story

Dinit, as an init system / service manager, needs to be able to respond to several different types of external event:

It needs to know when child processes have terminated, so that it can log and restart or continue to shut down any dependencies as appropriate

It needs to respond to signals which control its operation

It needs to receive and respond to requests coming over a socket connection, to allow service control

It needs to monitor timeouts so that a process which is taking too long to start or stop can be dealt with appropriately.

These requirements aren’t specific to service managers and in fact many programs, particularly network servers, need to be able to deal with a similar set of events. Typically an event-loop library is used to manage this; such a library allows monitoring a range of event types, and specifying callbacks to run when the events are detected. Most event-loop libraries use modern OS facilities such as kqueue or epoll as a back-end event delivery mechanism; in order to be able to offer some more advanced functionality such as event priorities, an event-loop library typically inserts received events in a queue rather than delivering them to the application immediately as they are detected.

When I started writing Dinit, my initial prototype used Libev, an event-loop library which is cross-platform, efficient and well-documented. It was good enough to get started with, but for an init system it had one glaring deficiency: insufficient support for error handling. In fact, the usual response of libev to encountering an error is to abort() the entire process, and there is no way to make the relevant functions return an error code instead. I began to look for a replacement. There were other event libraries, such as the venerable Libevent and the more recent Libuv, which improved error handling to the point that they could actually return error codes: but I wanted something better. Specifically, I wanted to know that certain operations could not fail, not just that I could meaningfully detect their failure.

Consider the case of a timer. If we have a service running as a process and receive a stop command for the service (perhaps as part of a system shutdown), we can send the process a signal – such as SIGTERM – requesting it to stop. But, we want to give it a reasonable time limit to respond to this signal, in case it has hung; so, we start a timer, and on expiry of the timer we can send SIGKILL in order to finish off the hung process. The issue is that, when using these existing event-loop libraries, the action of starting a timer can fail (for instance, due to resource limitations); this would leave us in the awkward position of not being able to time the process shutdown, and unless we take drastic action such as sending SIGKILL immediately, it potentially hangs the whole shutdown process.

Another example: event loops allow us to monitor the status of child processes, so we can detect when they terminate. However, in other event-loops, adding a watcher for a child process is a function that can fail. Again, this would leave us in an awkward position; we could terminate the child immediately, but it would be much better if we could have the ability to add a child watcher with no failure mode, or at least prevent forking the child if we could detect the current inability to add a watch for it.

The Birth of Dasynq

So, I set about writing Dasynq to address these issues. With Dasynq, you can pre-allocate timers and child process watchers, so that arming a timer or adding a child watch is an operation that simply cannot fail. Enabling and disabling I/O watchers, similarly, cannot fail.

At the same time, I addressed what I saw as some shortcomings in some of the other event-loop libraries (note that some of these apply to some libraries; they do not all apply to all libraries):

They did not allow setting timers against the system clock (the clock that potentially jumps when it is corrected by the user). This arguably shouldn’t be a common concern in this age of NTP-by-default configurations, but I still consider it a shortcoming

They use bad time representations; Libev for instance uses floating-point values to represent absolute time, which I consider an inherently bad idea. (edit: to be fair, though, a ‘double’ as used by Libev is fine for hundreds of years unless you need better than microsecond precision).

They had limited, or no, support for prioritising certain events over others.

They had limited support for multi-threaded applications.

Some of these were not a concern for Dinit, but I saw them as general shortcomings which could and should be addressed. And so I created Dasynq, and I’m now using it in Dinit. However, it’s fully documented, and should be usable in a range of other projects, too! As usual, feedback is welcome.

(Edit: I didn’t include boost::asio in any of the discussion above, mainly because it lacks a lot of the functionality that is present in the other event loops – such as POSIX signals, and child process watches – but also because I have concerns about the API it presents; of course it also retains the failure modes that formed my original motivation for creating Dasynq).